Bernadette Lafont, 74, Actress and Muse

Bernadette Lafont and Philippe Leotard in the 1972 film "A Gorgeous Girl Like Me" directed by Francois Truffaut.

Columbia Pictures, via Photofest

By ANITA GATES

July 31, 2013

Bernadette Lafont, a French actress whose sensuality and ebullience made her a muse of the iconoclastic New Wave that overtook France’s film industry in the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on July 25 in Nîmes, France. She was 74.

Her death was confirmed by the University Hospital Center in Nîmes. She had been admitted there three days earlier with heart problems, the newspaper Midi Libre reported.

The New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague, is generally considered to have burst onto the scene in 1959, but Ms. Lafont was ahead of the game. At 19, she starred in François Truffaut’s seminal 26-minute short, “Les Mistons” (“The Mischief Makers,” 1957). In 1958 she appeared as a promiscuous teenager in Claude Chabrol’s drama “Le Beau Serge,” about a man returning to his hometown. Her co-star in both was Gérard Blain, her husband from 1957 until their divorce in 1959.

Although she appeared in more than 100 films, on French television and onstage, Ms. Lafont was best known for her work with New Wave auteurs.

For Truffaut, she played a talkative murderer in “Une Belle Fille Comme Moi” (“A Gorgeous Girl Like Me,” 1972). In Jean Eustache’s erotic drama “La Maman et la Putain” (“The Mother and the Whore,” 1973) she was cast as the mother. She was a vengeful servant in Nelly Kaplan’s 1969 satire “La Fiancée du Pirate” (released in English as “A Very Curious Girl”) and a cheeky one in Louis Malle’s crime film “Le Voleur” (“The Thief of Paris,” 1967).

In 1986 Ms. Lafont won a César, the French equivalent of the Oscar, as best supporting actress for her role as a housekeeper in “L’Effrontée” (“The Impudent Girl”), starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. She received an honorary César, for lifetime achievement, in 2003.

Bernadette Lafont was born on Oct. 28, 1938, the daughter of a pharmacist, in Nîmes. She studied ballet there and performed at the local opera house before beginning her movie career.

She had three children with her second husband, Diourka Medveczky, a Hungarian sculptor.

Survivors include a son, David Lafont, and a daughter, Élisabeth Lafont. Another daughter, Pauline Lafont, died in a climbing accident in 1988.

In dealing with her grief, Ms. Lafont told the Web site purepeople.com, “Film and theater saved me completely.”

Her career was a major priority. “My work is the motor of my existence,” she wrote in “Le Roman de Ma Vie: Souvenirs,” her 1997 memoir. “My opium, my cocaine, my Prozac.”

In her final film, Sylvain Chomet’s “Attila Marcel,” scheduled to open in November, she is a controlling aunt, but in her penultimate picture, “Paulette,” a 2012 comedy hit, she played an elderly marijuana dealer. The Guardian of London described her persona in that film as “still insolent after all those years.”